Exactly how Cinco de Mayo turned into the signature celebration of the United States’ 52 million Hispanics is a bit of a mystery—especially since it is hardly celebrated in Mexico outside of the State of Puebla. Cinco de Mayo has no association with Mexican independence. It commemorates a battle on May 5, 1862, in which the Mexican army vanquished the well-equipped French forces of Napoleon III.

No one knows exactly why Hispanics in California began celebrating Cinco de Mayo at the end of the 1860s.

It was a good excuse for a party?

What we do know is that in the 1970s cultural organizers in San Francisco selected Cinco de Mayo from among a slate of holidays as the best pan-national Latino celebration in the U.S. It was a savvy choice. Most Mexicans had never heard of the holiday, so it didn’t carry the risk of pitting different Hispanic nationalities against one another.

I had never heard of cinco de mayo until quite recently, either. Neither had several friends and acquaintances from Latin America, who found out about it once they moved to the USA.

What does The Most Interesting Man in the World have to say about this?

Financial markets, which have been riding a roller coaster during the long campaign, are sure to take a win by Mr. Humala badly, analysts said. Investors viewed Ms. Fujimori as the candidate who would maintain the policies of openness toward foreign investment and trade, which helped Peru grow by 9% last year. Mr. Humala, who has made sharply contradictory statements on economic policy, would face pressure to immediately send signals to the market by revealing who would serve in key positions, such as Prime Minister and Economy Minister.

SUMMARY: Congressman James McGovern traveled in Ecuador from November 13 to 18, to visit sites at issue in the Chevron-Texaco oil pollution case, and Ecuadorian border communities affected by refugees and other aspects of the violence in Colombia. Congressman McGovern met with Government of Ecuador (GOE) Ministers and President Correa, and while taking no position on the unresolved Chevron-Texaco suit, expressed concern about the humanitarian, health and environmental impacts of oil contamination on local affected communities and the humanitarian situation on the border, and pledged to draw greater attention to the plight of refugees. Foreign Minister Salvador and Vice Defense Minister Miguel Carvajal asked McGovern for the U.S. Congress to investigate the March 1 Colombian attack against a FARC camp in Angostura, along the northern border of Ecuador, which McGovern did not agree to.

Retailers have put expansion plans on hold in the Mexican capital after the megacity’s government enacted a virtual three-year moratorium on openings of grocers, convenience stores and hypermarkets in an effort to shield traditional markets and small family-run bodegas from corporate competition.

George Washington is famous for many things. Yet it’s safe to say few know the nation’s founding father created a recipe for beer.

The New York Public Library owns the recipe and is partnering with Coney Island Brewing Company in Brooklyn to recreate the brew.

They’ll make just 25 gallons to celebrate the library’s centennial. It’ll be called “Fortitude’s Founding Father Brew.”

I suggest they brew several hundred gallons and send it to DC so the legislators can continue to spend like drunken sailors. You surely can’t expect that they’d have the Fortitude to seriously tackle the budget.

Sergeant Crowley, the sole class act in this trio, helps the handicapped Professor Gates down the stairs, while Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious?

Resolution 1874, which was approved last month and which condemned the North’s nuclear test, was the third to be passed by the U.N. Security Council against the country since 2006. All three ban North Korea from launching ballistic missiles.

This type of drinker could be a man or a woman. They tend to be sociable and convivial and “like a laugh”.

They take short swigs from bottled drinks so they don’t miss out on chipping in with the conversation.

The bottle is held loosely at its shoulder for ease. This type of person is always happy to extend their social circle. The best way to approach them therefore is to leap directly into light, good-humoured conversation and make them laugh.

However, it’s probably a good idea to stay away from the browbeater, whether the study is accurate or not.

If it passes, Oregon will overnight become the most taxing state for suds, one-third higher than the next highest beer tax state, Alaska. The state may do this even though Oregon is the second largest microbrewery producer in the U.S. The beer industry and its 96 breweries contribute 5,000 jobs and $2.25 billion to state GDP. Kurt Widmer of Widmer Brewing Co. says the tax would “devastate our company and small breweries throughout the state.” Adds Joe Henchman, director of state projects at the Tax Foundation, “This microbrewery industry has gravitated to Oregon in part due to low beer taxes.”

For Oregon to enact punitive taxes on its homegrown beer industry makes as much sense as Idaho slapping an excise tax on potatoes or for New York to tax stock trading. Even without the tax increase, taxes are the single most expensive ingredient in a glass of beer, according to the Oregon Brewers Guild.

Considering the ruinous state of New Jersey, I wouldn’t be surprised if the geniuses in Trenton follow the Oregon tax trail.

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson’s marvelous 2006 book, “The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.” It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

“The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”

The connection between civilization and beer is even stronger than George Will alleges. Nomads can do a lot of things but it’s darned hard to brew mead or beer unless you adopt a sedentary habit. There are anthropologists who believe that human beings founded the first permanent settlements in order to brew mead or beer. Beer-drinking anthropologists, naturally.

I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying a beer in Joyner’s company and have seen George Will drink a beer too, so we can all drink to that.